Sumana Roy

🔴 Sumana Roy writes: Once upon a time, one could be just a noun: ‘Professor’. That isn’t enough anymore and the adjectives must be worn like the medals on an army man

The career of the “literary” has not been very different from the Brahmin’s protectionism of the mantra, an inheritance kept out of the reach of the non-Brahmin. One of the ways in which this has been done in the last hundred years is through anthologies that create — and reiterate — the idea and the habitat of the literary.

As the COVID-19 pandemic makes work-from-home the new normal, a look at the workspaces of people who have always functioned in isolation -- writers. For Sumana Roy, the bed is her home and studio.

Lockdown verse, as the name suggests, is a series consisting of poems introspecting, examining and reflecting on the times we are living in. This week we have one poem each from Sumana Roy and Aditi Angiras.

'I want to be free of climate, of weather...'

Vinod Kumar Shukla’s literary universe is lit up by a culture of slowness and shyness

When all the elements have been poisoned, it remains — fighting plastic and our indifference, dying and living, renewing itself and life.

Travel with two poets across vast landscapes of love, loss and jaw-dropping beauty.

As we hear the voices of Sitas emerge from below the earth around us at last, it might be a moment of shift in history.

How does one remember a tree without fruit? Aamer pallab — that beautiful phrase for the collective of mango leaves; our mango tree became its supplier in the neighbourhood.

Siliguri, a tiny town in north Bengal: The novel of place is, perhaps, only a novel of people, those whom literature and art have chosen to imagine as ‘background’, people outside the spotlight.

The monsoon is the greatest show on the subcontinent. From the hilsa on our plate to the malhar on our lips, from the farmer aching for rain to the poets who find their muse. But first, how do you teach an infant the language of the rains?

Not only is Amit Chaudhuri’s latest book a hat tip to the historical novel, it is also living history

In between this new and news, always stale and arriviste, history and tradition, religion and the secular, patentable individualism and tradition-drugged “folk”, falls the shadow of The Cosmopolitans.